Storing and safeguarding electronic data is of paramount importance in modern business. Accordingly, various systems may be employed to protect such electronic data.
For example, disk arrays may be employed that contain multiple storage devices. Disk arrays may provide some level of redundancy by use of mirrored or redundant components (e.g., disk drives, disk controllers, power supplies and/or fans), each of which may be hot-swappable to avoid downtime.
Disk arrays may fall into a plurality of categories, such as Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Networks (SAN). A NAS system may be a stand-alone, network-accessible, hard disk storage system that may provide file-level access to electronic data. A SAN array may be a dedicated storage system that may connect numerous storage resources to one or many servers. A SAN may provide block-level access to electronic data through one or more Small Computer Systems Interface (SCSI) based protocols (e.g., Fiber Channel and iSCSI).
The use of solid-state disk drives in such disk arrays is increasing in popularity. A solid state disk drive is a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store persistent data. A solid-state disk drive may emulate (and therefore replace) a conventional hard disk drive. With no moving parts, a solid-state disk drive largely eliminates (or greatly reduces) seek time, latency and other electromechanical delays and failures associated with a conventional hard disk drive.
Unfortunately and as is true with all storage devices, the disk arrays may fill up with data and performance may fall off. Accordingly, additional disk drives may need to be added to enhance the storage capacity of the disk array.